Belle and Sebastian

Surprises are not really meant to be on the agenda at the Don't Look Back season of concerts. The concept of getting bands to play their best-loved album live allows fans to bask in familiarity: you should always know what's going to happen next. But three songs into Belle and Sebastian's performance of 1996's If You're Feeling Sinister, something surprising happens. They are playing Me and the Major, one of their second album's many songs of disappointment and bookish alienation. Guitarist Stevie Jackson huffs a harmonica frantically, singer Stuart Murdoch slashes a two-chord riff from his acoustic guitar. It all sounds, well, bizarrely muscular.

This is not an adjective usually associated either with Belle and Sebastian's music or, indeed, their fans. Emerging at Britpop's height, If You're Feeling Sinister swam defiantly against prevalent trends. When everyone else was writing songs that blokes could bellow along to at closing time, Belle and Sebastian offered a kind of rallying call for wallflowers. The LP's songs were hushed and literate, populated by misfit athletes and schoolgirls seeking religion. The sound seemed entirely based on music verboten under Britpop's laddish traditionalism: French pop, wispy singer-songwriters, 60s soul and the oft-derided jangle of mid-80s indie. It was a fantastic album, heralding Murdoch's unique songwriting talent. But, live, Belle and Sebastian proved maddening: transcendent beauty one night, an inaudible shambles the next.

Tonight, an opening lucky dip of b-sides designed to "warm the band up" strongly suggest the evening might belong in the latter category. You can actually hear the band, which is a start, but you can't hear the lyrics because Murdoch keeps forgetting them. The audience applaud wildly anyway, but it augurs ill. "You're too kind," says Murdoch, "since you only got half the bloody words." By the time they play If You're Feeling Sinister's bleak opener, Stars of Track and Field, however, Belle and Sebastian are transformed.

The 12 musicians onstage gel so perfectly that familiar songs take on a new life, their emotional impact amplified way beyond the recorded versions. Fox in the Snow sounds impossibly tender and sad. The closing Judy and the Dream of Horses even provokes the most timid audience rampage in popular music history. It takes several minutes of gentle coaxing from Murdoch to get started, but eventually a few fans storm the stage, or at least the shadows at the right hand side, as if they don't want to bother anyone. It's like watching a stage invasion scripted by Alan Bennett, but as they bob about rather self-consciously in the gloom and the final chorus of the song spirals gleefully upwards, you're struck by how the decade since If You're Feeling Sinister's release has done nothing to blunt Belle and Sebastian's mysterious individuality.